And that’s before you so much as mention its heart-thumpingly focused mid-engined chassis, or its delicious non-power-assisted steering, or its brakes, which are so powerful that, sometimes, they can make your eyes turn bright yellow.

It has no more power than the standard car, Lotus instead choosing to pursue ‘the less is more’ style of development in this case. Thus, having revisited the already spartan interior, chucked out the unrequired sound-deadening materials, added a fire extinguisher and a beefier roll cage, and then thought about how the car could be preened to make it even more incisive to drive, Lotus has produced what is one of the most serious track days cars there has ever been.

And yet the car is still just about road-legal. Which means that you can, at a pinch, drive it to whichever track day you are intending to terrorise, do the business on the circuit, and then drive back home in it at the end of the day.

Having said that, I drove the car on the road for a while, shortly before letting rip in it around the shiny new test track that they’ve built at Lotus, and amazingly it wasn’t anywhere near as unpalatable as I was expecting it to be.

On the road, the V6 Cup feels – and sounds – properly quick, too. It’s 60kg lighter than the standard V6, and you can feel the difference that this makes in the extra zip it delivers under acceleration, and when changing direction; in everything it does on move, basically.

The all-round double-wishbone suspension is fundamentally unchanged but it has been massaged (slightly stiffer springs, two-way adjustable dampers) to produce even crisper responses on the move. There’s also less roll and tauter body control under extreme cornering, all of which became instantly apparent on Hethel’s excellent new test track.